Intro to creative play/intro to the making of week:12: 13/12/17: City life animation log 004: Finalising animation:

Description:

Session 2 of intro to the making of today was actually a chance for us to finalise our city projects in creative play, before the hand in deadline of tomorrow at 2:00pm. We would be using the time provided to finish or fine tune our animations and this was the chance for me to fix and finalise my animation piece and a chance for the rest of the people in my team to finish their work as like me they too were having issues with their animations in terms of lip synching. I worked on shortening my animation piece but tried to maintain some of my comedic lines in the piece. I tried to maintain some comedy when shortening the piece but at the same time some of my original script. So I looked through my animation and remembering from the lip synching video examples I translated the said language from the silent lip synching. I then worked on an ending for this piece and I decided to do a comedic how can it get worse scenario when the rubbish mentions it can't get any worse it starts to rain and this makes the bin say a classic "you were saying".

I remembered from the lessons on effects in After Effects the CC Rainfall effect causing rain and so I decided to put it to work and I went to the effects option in the tool bar and selected distort and found the effect and applied it to the composition, adjusting the speed and size of the rain fall. I showed this to Beth and the rest of the group and they liked it but Beth suggested making it slightly darker to show that the weather had changed and seeing this was a good suggestion. To darken the piece I lowered the opacity at the exact moment when the trash ended its sentence and using the stopwatch keyframe it was applied and worked when I played it through. This seemed to work very well, and so I applied the ending credits of the end. At home I worked on the sounds, recording the voices using my phones voice memo app and I made sure to deepen and raise my voice with characters like the bin and rubbish ball. However when introducing the voices to the After Effects file some of the voices didn't match up with the lip synching.

Animation shortened and effects applied:

Thankfully though there was a simple suggestion to record alongside the playing film, and this seemed to work very well. However there was another issue with one of the voices and that was the longest of them all which was the bin complaining about how the people toss rubbish into him and they missed. The ending of the sentence didn't seem to match the whole lip synch, so I introduced a last minute sentence ending to make up for this and it didn't seem to entirely match up but it seemed to work either way. In terms of the rain I recorded a rain sound from Youtube as the chances of rain were very slim and I needed some sounds now. For the city sounds I decided to make use of the bin video from when we did research in Picadilly, for the sounds and when placed together it seemed to work very well. I cut out the sound at the end to accompany the arriving sound of the rain and the comedic wha wha wha at the end. I rendered the animation and posted it on Facebook for the groups opinions.

However to avoid being accused of plagiarism in the sounds I added the references of the sounds in my ending credits and other sources. I also lowered the opacity on the video sounds as looking back it did seem to show the video when the opacity was lowered at the raining scene. My first animation masterpiece for the course was finished at last, after the stress and tears that I went through it was all worth it for the outcome.

Final Animation.

Feelings: 

When working on my animation I was feeling slightly nervous as I was worried I wouldn't meet the deadline in time thankfully though when Annabeth mentioned that todays making of session was the time we needed to work on the animations we produced I was relieved. When translating the animation lip-synching it was very difficult and I did feel a bit strained when I was trying to work out what he was saying. When recording the voices alongside the playing animation I was fining it rather hard to keep up with the animation. I was feeling worried when I couldn't match it up with the playing animation and I realised it was possibly due to the way I timed the mouth movements in Animate CC. I was feeling relieved when I finally rendered the animation and could bring this to a close but it did get me wondering on what to do for tomorrow when we would be coming in to finalise some elements for our project before hand in.

Evaluation:

Looking back on my work from the past few days, on this animation I would think there were some things to learn from this experience. One of them would be the time I took on the lip synching movements in my original plan and how it was causing too much stress for me, and should've remembered the old saying "keep it simple stupid". One element that I could possibly improve on would be adjusting the time that I had added to the lip synching animation for the near ending lines as the time had taken a lot of synching in the lips and the speech being spoken. Otherwise when rendering and adding the effect of the animation I was rather pleased that I had remembered the rain effect from the lesson in Intro to the Making of when we were introduced to rostrum animation.

Analysis:

Looking at what I had done I soon realised the sense of shortening my animation after the stress my original plan from yesterday had put me through and it would help when it came time to do the instagram account that we would be placing our animations on for our work, as I had reduced it to 60 seconds the required limit. Upon looking at the finalised result I would possibly make a more reduced animation and possibly seek others advice on this matter and reply to their opinions and suggestions.

Conclusion:

In conclusion I would think that this lesson helped very well for me to refine and finalise my animation in time for the hand in date tomorrow. I was even pleased with the new suggestion that I had made for keeping the comedic side of the animation and even using effects that I had learned abut in past lessons of creative play and intro to the making of which was the very idea of this course and project taking what we had learned in the lessons and putting it to a practical use in the final submission. By the end I was glad I had gotten my animation completed in time could be ready for submission tomorrow.

Action Plan:

Learning from the mistakes and ideas in this animation project I would think that I would possibly first talk to Annabeth about the stress that I had been having the previous night working on this animation and discuss what I could cut out and what I Could include in the final piece. I would also discuss with my group about my issues and I would possibly learn that I wasn't the only one having issues with the lip synching in the animation  and would possibly get the same suggestion of trying to cut down on the animation time span.